While I wouldn’t call it a tome, it earns its $30 price. It’s crammed with stories from Mrs. Obama, the White House chef, community gardeners from across the country, garden plans, garden tips.

Call it a weighty scrapbook, roughly organized by season, but full of interjections, like the one in the Spring chapter that accompanies an historic photo of sheep grazing on the South Lawn, or the one in Summer where she dishes on what happened when Food Network stars (Alton Brown, Rachel Ray, Tom Colicchio) visited the garden. Park Service personnel add their takes on facets of gardening. Some of the profiles of community gardens are written by the gardeners.

Panicking because of the drought warning? You aren’t alone. A few days ago a colleague asked me “So what do I do? I forgot to aerate. Do I just water like crazy before all the water is gone?”

Like him, I should have known how little subsoil moisture we had when my camassia — below right — performed poorly this spring when every year since 2008, they’d been beautiful spikes of bloom that lasted weeks. This year they barely bloomed at all.

Panayoti Kelaidis, senior curator at the Denver Botanic Gardens and an evangelist for plants adapted to steppe ecosystems, describes such climactic hiccups as a lesson for Front Range newcomers. “The only reason one would panic is one is fresh to Colorado. This is par for the course, and we should learn to expect it. The plants we should be growing love this sort of thing.”

And for trees this size, that doesn’t mean climbing your ladder and attacking them with a chainsaw. In fact, stay off of that ladder and drop the loppers. First off, be safe, says Ralph Bronk of Mountain High Tree, Lawn & Landscape Co. Climbing a ladder with a two-handed tool is simply asking to be injured. Even the pros are roped into the tree to prevent falls or simply bring the big bucket truck.

The tree in the photo that Bronk provided has what’s known as a double leader — a narrow “V” that, had the tree been pruned properly when it was small, wouldn’t exist. Those two trunks are joined by weak tissue that’s prone to split in wind, especially if the tree has suffered internal decay or drought stress or been previously weakened (like, by the hella West winds we’ve been having all year.). This is something that expert tree gals and guys know. Don’t just hand money to someone who shows up on your porch with a chain saw. Seek out a qualified arborist. Usually, that will be a tree company that at least HAS some certified arborists on staff. They’re nice, they really know trees, and unless they have to climb the tree or bring the bucket truck to see the damage, they don’t charge for their estimates. They can even advise you on a regular pruning/thinning schedule, so that this won’t happen to you.So what are you supposed to do this weekend, when there’s finally little wind and it’s a little bit warm and you’re all gassed up to go outside and wreak order upon your yard chaos?

Because really, what you need to do mostly is have patience. Tackle those OTHER yard chores. Trim & tidy your cold-hardiest perennials. Water and fertilize your budding bulbs. You’ve got until about mid-April to deal with your tree (though arborists can prune throughout the year.) Wait until the almost-freezing cold of midnight or the crack of dawn and knock down any old wasp nests. Get after your gutters. Really, there’s plenty to do out there. [Hey, I’ve got BEETS still in the ground from last fall! I guess I’d better go dig them up!]

If your tree lost a lot of canopy in last October’s snow, it’s going to need all the leaves it can produce to feed itself and recover this summer. You can live with a little asymmetry for a year.

This first blush of spring will pass, but an incorrect cut on an already stressed tree? That’s forever. So take it easy. Be safe out there.

I’m here to tell you: Nobody can resist a rose. But if you want to give a Valentine’s Day present that says you’ll be around a while? Sure, give one longstem, just in a nod to tradition. But add a giftcard to a local nursery that carries Plant Select plants. Because then you get to tell your significant other about this stunner.

Yeah. That’s “Ruby Voodoo.” In addition to just being fun to say (props to the name-pickers!) this rose is a new, 2012 selection for Plant Select. That means it’s one of six plants that the consortium of Colorado State University and Denver Botanic Garden experts have tested in Colorado conditions for years.

Plant Select exec director Pat Hayward gave me the chance to sniff-test this rose last week at ProGreen Expo, the industry conference that preceeds the Colorado Home & Garden Show, which kicks off today (Saturday Feb. 11). It was sitting in a howling gale off the loading dock of the Colorado Convention Center. It wasn’t shivering, it wasn’t wilting. The blooms had been forced in a greenhouse in February, so my own iPhone photo of it doesn’t really do it justice. And yes, it IS fragrant. I definitely salivated. In warm weather, it might have that knee-weakening punch to the limbic system that any fan of roses hankers for. Gets about 5-6 feet tall and is called a “moderate repeat bloomer.” Plant Select’s website has another photo of the whole plant.

I have mostly Plant Select Plants on my hell corner, a.k.a. my “Proof of Life” garden. “Sunset” hyssop. Purple poppy mallow. They’ve done well in really horrid soil, with only occasional pampering. “Wild Thing” salvia got6 winter killed there, but that’s to be expected from a Zone 6 plant. It was still a stunner the year I had it, and drew hawk moths in droves, buzzing around it like crazy at dusk.

There are other 2012 PS plants: a killer bicolored ice plant; two tough, floriferous daisies, one white and one yellow; a weeping white spruce whose graceful, downturned branches will shed snow loads like the one we just got two weeks ago; and a lovely little blue forget-me-not.

Who doesn’t love a rose? A lot of consumers, who think of them as fussy, says Kent Broome, sales rep for Bailey Nurseries. Broome spoke Tuesday (Feb. 7) at ProGreen Expo, the annual confab for plant and landscaping people at the Colorado Convention Center.

And that means the people who sell plants, and the plant breeders who develop them, have a lot of educating to do.

These days, breeders are creating roses to fill a demand for cold hardy, disease-resistent, repeat or ever-blooming plants. “The new generation in their 30s, they want nothing to do with going out and slaving for hours in the rose garden.”

In fact, they don’t even HAVE rose gardens. And that’s just fine – roses are more beautiful and look more natural among perennials, shrubs, and annuals – in short, in the landscape, he says.

Digging in is digging out. There was a two-and-a-half foot drift in my walkway, and more snow to shovel all around the corner. The snow came in from the northeast, so it scooped into my walkway and wrapped all around it.

All night, while the snow silently fell, I had a cooking project going on: Dutch bullet beans that I got from Grant Family Farms last fall. Soaked a pound of them overnight, rinsed and then simmered them in the morning until al dente, drained them while shoveling, and then seasoned them to taste: salt, pepper, Vulcan’s fire salt, fresh ground cumin, then MORE fresh ground cumin, a couple pinches cardamom, a pinch of cinnamon, and then a dressing of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and Bragg’s Amino’s. Tasty! I think that if I had to do it over again, I might have simmered them in broth or cider. They’ll either go into a quinoa pilaf or get smacked with some lime juice and almond butter and become hummus.

I can’t tell you quantities on the seasonings, because that’s just not how I cook: I taste and add and taste and add and sometimes, if I’m not sure of myself, I take a big spoonful of whatever it is I’m seasoning and add a little bit of what I’m thinking of and see how it goes. And then add it to the big batch. I’m not a recipe cook. If I’d had tamari, I’d have added that, but I don’t, and it’s just a great day to raid the pantry and see what I can come up with, with what I have, without hitting the streets or the stores.

Weather is a great teacher. I’ve seen a lot of blizzards in my 13 years in Colorado, a lot of them from the car windows. This one, I embraced and took a vacation day to tie up loose ends. And that makes it more beautiful, even after two hours of shoveling.

As I marshalled my courage to pull the blizzard cover off my lettuce, a press release from Den Corner Restaurants, owners of the Denver eateries Sushi Den, Izakaya Den and OTOTO, crossed my desk. Earlier this year, the restaurant consortium bought a 6.5-acre farm in Brighton to supply its fresh produce. Now it’s broken ground on a 3,000-square-foot, passive solar greenhouse to keep that supply going through the winter months, when many fresh veggies are shipped in from warmer states.

The new greenhouse will use “principles of building science including heavy perimeter, wall, and roof insulation, automated insulating shutters, high solar heat gain glazing, systems for controlling solar light and heat to maximize growth, plenty of thermal mass, and carefully controlled ventilation” so that the restaurant can grow its own micro-greens, herbs, and some citrus year-round. Special pipes will route warm air under the soil so that it never freezes.

Pipes will route warm air under the soil at the Den Corner Restaurants Greenhouse

Back at my own house, I’d tossed a white wool U.S. Navy surplus blanket across my brick planter that first cold night last weekend. And then … things got busy and got really cold, and what with this surprise and that surprise … I never did peel it back and cut the lettuce. This morning, the sun was back, and I was braced to find frozen, matted green slime.

I found survivors instead. The warm, south-facing brick planter box surely had something to do with it. Things were a bit smashed and matted down from the snow load, and many arugula leaves (which, frankly is most of what remains) did freeze. But check out that leaf lettuce. And there’s some tattered tat soi peeking out. It all makes me want to build a cold frame to put over those bricks and see just what winter will let me get away with. Hey, if it’s good enough for those chic chefs at Sushi Den …

Now: Who wants to bet me I can keep this zombie lettuce going until the solstice?

With our landscapes turned to either mud-straw brown or glittering white, depending, I’ve been enjoying a literary time-trip to a place with the gift of good, rich soil and water that falls from the sky (though not always gently or in moderate quantities).

Anthology Book Co., the used/new bookstore/coffeehouse in my home town of Loveland, Colorado, puts its discriminating owners’ picks on display racks facing customers at The Coffee Tree, so they can peruse while they wait in line. There are always treasures in those racks. One of the recent ones was “My Vegetable Love,” by Carl H. Klaus, my writing professor from a couple of decades ago at the University of Iowa, and a painterly gardener. Carl had a potager before that word was common garden parlance, with the lettuces and broccoli and tomatoes and basil and peppers arranged to please the eye, as well as provide for his table. The book came out in the late ’90s and is still in print. (Find it at the University of Iowa Press Bur Oak Books.)

Carl’s daily journal from the year before he retired is sequenced from the plantings (and overwintered spinach harvest) in March to the last gleanings in November. I found it at Anthology also in November, when northern Colorado’s tortured trees had newly shrugged off that destructive October snow. When the dead seemed to outnumber the living in the plant world. I thought it would be interesting to read “My Vegetable Love” crosswise of the calendar, to remind me that March will come and that reticulated irises will rise again from my brown and tattered flower beds. To give me hope that my own tiny yard will finally sport the vegetable beds of my dreams, full of rich, black soil, in 2012.

If you haven’t encountered Carl’s prose before, you’re in for a treat. He was for many years the director of the University of Iowa’s literary nonfiction master’s program, and his book is full of his finely whetted sentences. He watches the weather, the plants, the birds, and life’s own meandering course. He is grounded very much in the day-to-day, and yet ruminates on a long and fruitful career. I couldn’t recommend a more peaceable, rewarding companion for the time when you can’t have your hands in the soil. (And after a good 20 years, I can still see his Einstein-esque eyebrows now, waggling at the first piece of writing I did that he thought was any good. When your writing earned his praise, it was always a sunny day).